Yevonde: Life and Colour

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Yevonde (1893–1975), also known as Madame Yevonde, was a London-based photographer of portraits and still lifes whose motto was "be original or die." In her 1940 memoir, In Camera, [11] Yevonde wrote, 'I took up photography with the definite purpose of making myself independent. I wanted to earn money of my own'. [12] Exhibitions [ edit ] This revelation suddenly breathed life into her photos, as I began to notice the number of soldiers featured in her portraits alongside an impressive range of celebrities from A. A. Milne to Paul Robeson. As it turns out, Yevonde began taking photos of celebrity ‘workers in war-time’ which were reproduced in The Sketch and was responsible for helping families identify their loved ones who were lost during wartime through portraits she had taken of them. LaBarge, Emily (18 August 2023). "Creating a Riot of Color, in a Studio of Her Own". The New York Times. Vol.172. p.C6. ISSN 0362-4331 . Retrieved 25 August 2023.

A new exhibition showcasing the ground-breaking work of 20 th century British photographer Yevonde will be shown at the Laing Art Gallery. Yevonde: Life and Colour was organised by the National Portrait Gallery, London. In 1921, she became the first women to lecture at the Professional Photographers’ Association. In the 1930s – against a tide of resistance – she championed the use of colour photography and was the first person in Britain to exhibit colour portraits. Despite the successes in her time, Madame Yevonde’s pioneering work has been overshadowed in history by her male compatriots—as is often the case for many women artists. The auction and museum worlds have historically played a part in diminishing the contributions of women artists: a 2019 study showed that between 2008 and 2018, women artists accounted for only 11 percent of major museum acquisitions in the United States, and even fewer have received exhibitions dedicated solely to their work. It is enthralling that there are further revelations to be transformed into colour after almost a century or, for some, for the very first time.” A suffragette and lifelong supporter of women’s rights, Yevonde opened her first studio in London in 1914, aged just 21. In a career spanning more than six decades, her portraits, still life, and commercial work straddled the genres of narrative art, Modernism, mythology, and Surrealism.

Yevonde’s Goddesses Series

Yevonde was a vivacious and adaptable photographer operating her London studio throughout most of the twentieth century. Feminist The feminist aspects of Yevonde’s work are also emphasised, bringing to the fore the artist’s confrontational gaze upon the expectation of women to be beautiful wives and domestic goddesses during the 1930s. This is shown, for example, in the awareness of a staged perfection in Rosemary Chance’s pose in Laundry, and in the commentary on female stereotypes that are hinted towards in the Surrealist still life of a bust of Egyptian Queen Nefertiti, who holds an iron. In the transformed National Portrait Gallery, almost half the sitters and artists are now women, and the Yevonde exhibition is a fitting celebration of this gallery-wide shift to a more inclusive narrative.

Always looking to vary her approach, her innovations include double portrait montages (typically of couples), while later experimentation with solarisation (a darkroom technique used to reverse tones) echo the much earlier work of Man Ray and Lee Miller. An extraordinary image of the young Judi Dench is a good example. Yevonde’s muses Yet, it’s hard to glean a profound artistic soul beneath the glittering consumerist carapace of her advertisements for products including Weingarten corsets and Lanolin hand cream. Throughout, there’s a surfeit of titivating glaze and gloss; Crisis (1939), an “allegory of war” in which a gas mask adorns a bust of Julius Caesar, feels banal.Yevonde: Life and Colour, a third National Portrait Gallery exhibition, opened in London on 22 June 2023, [16] [17] with an accompanying catalogue edited by Clare Freestone. [18] The exhibition’s strength is in its understanding that art is always a collaborative affair. Yevonde is the star of the show but there are other important contributors. But along with his terrific team of curators, director Nicholas Cullinan has made the most judicious of selections with this balance in mind. The rare and profoundly significant are beautifully displayed: the Chandos portrait, quietly off to one side, just as one imagines Shakespeare himself. The only surviving portrait of the three Brontës, a damaged fragment in a poignant case. The sole likeness of Jane Austen, so small it is presented at the end of a sequence of perfect miniatures like the coda to an evolving narrative. The National Portrait Gallery, London, reopens in June following a three-year closure for the “ largest redevelopment” in its 127-year history. Its opening exhibition, Yevonde: Life and Colour, will be the most comprehensive to date on British photographer, Yevonde Middleton (1893-1975). a b B, Lizzie (25 January 2023). "Yevonde Middleton (1893-1975)". Women Who Meant Business . Retrieved 28 January 2023.

At the same time, Yevonde was excited to discover that a few studios were beginning to explore the new process, despite feeling that their preoccupation with achieving naturalistic colour rendered everything “astonishingly unattractive”. Yevonde's most famous work was inspired by a theme party held on 5 March 1935, where guests dressed as Roman and Greek gods and goddesses. Yevonde subsequently took studio portraits of many of the participants (and others), in appropriate costume and surrounded by appropriate objects. This series of prints showed Yevonde at her most creative, using colour, costume and props to build an otherworldly air around her subjects. She went on to produce further series based on the signs of the zodiac and the months of the year. Partly influenced by surrealist artists, particularly Man Ray, Yevonde used surprising juxtapositions of objects which displayed her sense of humour.I started experimenting madly”, she remembered in her autobiography, “oblivious of the fact that people did not want such things.” The British photographer Yevonde was a businesswoman and tireless creator; as an innovator committed to color photography when it was not considered a serious medium, her work is significant in the history of portrait photography. Yevonde’s portraits embody glorified tradition countered with a desire for the new; her most renowned body of work is a series of women dressed as goddesses posed in surreal tableaux from the 1930s. Yevonde championed photography during a time when there were few women photographers working professionally, and this book tells the story of her life, her works and her 60-year career. Yevonde’s decade was undoubtedly the 1930s, an era of grand costume parties in which arch modernists were fascinated by mythology. She was thrilled by the invention of Vivex, the first colour print service for professional photographers in the UK, and became its most brilliant advocate. The technology used three negative plates (cyan, magenta and yellow), exposed through a specially designed “one-shot” camera, and processed separately – which freed Yevonde to manipulate the colours and experiment with balance – before the images were printed on top of each other. Vivex’s name, like Kodak, was chosen because it was an entirely new word. Dwyer, Britta C. (13 November 2006). "The Zinkeisen sisters – Great Scotswomen (from The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women)". Heritage & Culture. Edinburgh University Press. Archived from the original on 7 August 2007 . Retrieved 17 April 2010.

O'Callaghan, Declan (1 October 2019). "Madame Yevonde". University College London, The Equiano Centre ("Blog for Drawing over the Colour Line project") . Retrieved 25 August 2023. Yevonde: Life and Colour opens at the revamped National Portrait Gallery on Thursday and will feature a comprehensive selection of works dreamed up by this brilliant artist across a 60-year-career. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more joyful show anywhere in the country. The exhibition will also feature a new colour print of her portrait of Surrealist patron and poet Edward James. The image was used on the cover of his 1938 volume of poetry, The Bones of My Hand. Our reopening exhibition Yevonde: Life and Colour will explore the life and career of Yevonde – a pioneering London photographer who spearheaded the use of colour photography in the 1930s. You are immediately in the here and now – and the great feat of this renewal is to sustain that effect from first to last. Visitors ascend by escalator to the Elizabethan court, where the queen appears surrounded by her many male champions, all briefly captured in stupendous portraits before their respective executions or fall from grace. Round a corner, you are confronted by funeral monuments, spotlit in dramatic darkness.Wit and raw energy emanate from her most famous series, The Goddesses – inspired by a charity ball in 1935 attended by society women dressed as mythical figures from western antiquity. Most previous exhibitions have favoured Yevonde’s Goddesses Series. The planned show at the reopened Portrait Gallery, however, will broaden the scope considerably and include some newly discovered works. Tom Shakespeare : Intellect, with Wheels, Lucy Jones’s scintillating vision of the bioethicist and disability rights campaigner, wheeling round in his chair, has his irrepressible energy and mirth. Alex Katz’s massive yet minimalist diagram of Anna Wintour has the Vogue queen’s icy style to perfection. Slotted in between, emphasising its absurdly flattering elongations, and oleaginous glint, Jamie Coreth’s oil portrait of two actual royals, Prince William and the Princess of Wales.